نشریه فلسفه و کودک
سال سوم شماره 2 (پیاپی 10، تابستان 1394)

Philosophy for Children is a teaching method which leads children’s minds towards an attempt to respond to their need and enthusiasm for meaning. Teaching philosophy for children does not mean teaching the ideas of philosophers to children; rather, it means teaching them the reasoning and discrimination skills and developing their judgment power. Recently, the program of teaching philosophy for children has been employed in some countries. That is why an attempt has been made to use this program in Iran for the moral and philosophical development and correct training of adolescents, as well as for improving their reasoning and judgment powers. Since the stories designed for this program do not match the Iranian culture, the researchers decided to use some of the Iranian moral stories which suited their purpose. To achieve the research purpose, S‘adi’s Gulistan, which is a moral and instructional book, was chosen and its stories were simplified. The target sample of this study included all the students of one of the girls’ schools (teaching human sciences) in District 1 of Tehran. From among them, a class of 30 students was chosen as the ultimate research sample. The instrument used for data collection included Kholberg’s Moral Judgment Test, interview, observation, and note-taking. The collected data from the interviews, observations, and notes were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results of this research indicated that the use of native Iranian stories while following the method of teaching philosophy for children and adolescents program possesses the required rigor and efficiency for the development of moral values and urban life skills of adolescents.

One of the most important features of children is creativity, which is in fact an inseparable part of their life. If this characteristic is ignored, it will gradually fade away in the realm of social competitions, school, and family and, finally, disappears in the turmoil of life. Given the fact that creativity is necessary for change, advancement, and creating new directions, those societies which keep this feature alive and try to develop it will certainly play a significant role in the world in future. In this paper, in addition to introducing the concept of creativity, the writer has tried to explain the necessity of its existence in societies and focus on the conditions and methods that are required for its survival. If such conditions are provided in a society, it will certainly experience a better future.

A thinking and philosophical mind enjoys three basic features: comprehensiveness, reflectiveness, and flexibility. One of the essential responsibilities of teachers is to help with the development of a philosophical mind. This is realized in the light of “philosophical inquiry”, and the main role in this process of inquiry is played by “questions”. Generating appropriate questions is the first step in philosophical thinking. By appropriate questions, the writers mean those which require children to perform some mental activities in order to induce and discover the relationships among different things. Such questions should be posed by using some homogeneous words which appear semantically unrelated; however, discovering the hidden relationships among them would be quite attractive to children. In this research, the experimental group was exposed to such questions over a learner-centered treatment period (similar to P4C), and their performance was compared with that of a control group. The findings demonstrated that posing such questions was effective in the development of a philosophical mind. This research was conducted following the field and library methods. A questionnaire and a series of interviews with the participants were used to collect the required data for the study, and the non-parametric Kolgomorov-Smirnov test was used to compare the experimental and control groups.

This study was conducted in order to explore the effects of the Philosophy for Children Program on the achievement motivation of sixth grade male students. The initial sample of this study consisted of 86 students who were chosen from among all the sixth grade male students of the city of Shiraz following the method of cluster sampling. Firstly, Hermans’ Achievement Motivation Test was given to all the participants as a pretest. Later, in order to test the research hypotheses, 30 students who had scored lowest on this test were chosen and randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups. During the treatment period, the experimental group received instruction following Lipman’s method of community of inquiry in the Philosophy for Children Program for 10 sessions, each 75 minutes. During these sessions, some stories in accordance to the purpose of research were chosen and read collaboratively. At the end of the treatment, the same test was given as a post-text to both groups. Analysis of covariance was used to compare the performances of the experimental and control groups with each other. The findings indicated that the teaching of philosophy had significantly improved the experimental students’ scores on the second administration of the Achievement Motivation Test.

The purpose of the present research was to examine the relationships between metacognitive strategies, creativity, and autonomy of male fourth-graders at a high school in Abdanan County following the descriptive-correlational method. The target population of this study consisted of all high school male fourth-graders in Abdanan in the educational year 2015-2016, from among whom 123 were chosen through simple random sampling by using Morgan’s Table. The data collection instruments consisted of three metacognitive strategies, creativity, and autonomy questionnaires. The Pearson Product Moment Formula was used to analyze the data. The findings indicated that there was a meaningful positive relationship between metacognitive strategies and autonomy. Moreover, there was a meaningful positive relationship between creativity and autonomy. The significance level for data analysis was set at 0.05.

Presently, the programs of teaching philosophy to children are executed in the world in the form of one of the influential philosophical trends for transferring the concepts and skills required for philosophical thinking, observing ethics, and maintaining public order. The concepts and skills associated with public order in such programs are sometimes presented overtly and sometimes covertly through the attitudes, studies, and works related to such programs. Such attitudes and work embody certain elements of ontology, epistemology and, accordingly, the specific methodology of the societies which create them. Therefore, in order to use these programs efficiently in explaining and expanding public order from an Islamic point of view, it is initially necessary to indigenize them based on the above-mentioned criteria and Islamic insight. Using the method of content analysis, the present study concludes that the programs of teaching philosophy to children can provide appropriate models for disseminating and teaching various public order skills in the country provided that they conform with the three-fold criteria of Islamic indigenization. Here, the writers have tried to present a polished selection of public order skills based on such criteria.

The present paper, while explaining the process of philosophical counseling, is intended to challenge one of the important problems that have engaged both parents and teachers nowadays. In doing so, the writer firstly poses some fundamental questions including: what are the reasons for students’ anxiety? Do students have a low level of IQ? Should we search for the roots of their problems in their tensions and emotions? What is meant by philosophical educational counseling? How does it help the students to deal with their educational problems? Then she introduces a method of dealing with students’ educational problems called “philosophical counseling”. This method has at its heart the method of Socratic dialog which concentrates on thinking. Here, the students are not viewed as empty vessels which must be continually filled by teachers. Neither are they considered as individuals who should receive advice from both their teachers and parents at all times. Rather, they are conceived of free, equal, and independent learners. This method also presents some new ideas with regard to testing students and its related problems.